This Blog is managed by Pratin Ashtekar and Amy Bennett. The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of each author and do not necessarily represent the views,positions,strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management. IBM reserves the right to remove content deemed inappropriate.

Part 3 - From San Diego to #ibmimpact 2013 ....

The Day 2 Impact 2013 Business in Motion general session felt like a continuation of the first day and that is a very good thing. The first day was all about putting Mobile first and today points 2 and 3 were covered (see pic below). Alot of time was spent speaking about having good business processes and following a SOA for your enterprise applications. A point was made that if your enterprise is already embracing SOA, your Mobile journey will hopefully be less rocky. There were also two great customers that came up and presented - Australia's largest private health insurer (sorry, I forgot their name) and BMI, who played some great musical snippets during their presentation.

My next stop was to the System z Best Practices customer panel and Michael Perera, IBM Vice President of WebSphere on System z was the moderator. I don't know if it was planned, but having customers from all around the world - Japan, Russia, Australia and the U.S. was a very nice touch. There were many technical questions tossed to the panel, but these seasoned System z customers handled them very easily. I think it was very engaging, and being that most of the audience were System z customers (except for one!), I think they learned some best practices.

By the way, WAS is turning 15 years old and the team had a cake made! I wish I could tell you how it tasted, but I wasn't able to stick around for it to be cut...

After lunch, I visited the Mobile Mini-Main tent where Kristen Lauria, IBM Vice President of Mobile Enterprise, was the moderator and for the next hour and a half, the audience was given a wealth of information from the 8 speakers (Yes! Eight speakers!). Let me try to net it out for you...IBM Worklight is the Application and Data Platform, IBM EndPoint provides Management, Rational AppScan handles Security, and the new IBM acquisition, TeaLeaf, provides Analytics. All of this software is then surround by IBM GBS for Strategy & Design, Development & Integration, and Cloud & Managed services. Forrester, AVNet, and ING provided great information and some extra polish to an already engaging and eventful presentation.

Even though by this time I felt like I had just drank from a fire hose, I pressed on and went to "Positioning zEnterprise and PureSystems Based on Workload Characteristics" presented by Thomas Kraus from IBM. Since I work for System z marketing, I wanted to make sure that I understood our product positioning...and see how well our customers received it. Thomas did a great job setting up the conversation and described that there isn't a simple one fit solution and that it all depends on exactly what your enterprise is trying to achieve and the workloads that you are or will be running. At a very rudimentary level, if you are already a System z shop, then you should stay with System z and if you are traditional Power shop, then you should look to consolidating onto PureSystems. He spoke at length about the Eagle Studies that IBM provides to help customers find the best fit for their business. Several of the customers seemed to have had Eagle Studies done previously and they were shaking their heads emphatically.

My head was just about full, but I couldn't pass up a Mobile software development using the Cloud conversation, so went to the "Mobile DevOps on IBM SmartCloud" presentation. Being able to build Mobile applications with minimal client-side development tools, seemed too interesting to forego. Ethan and John from IBM really made this chat palatable (thank you!) and explained how IBM Worklight combined with Zend Studio, some IBM pieces, and some partner tools all on IBM SmartCloud provide a comprehensive and hopefully simple online development solution to build Mobile applications. Ethan then showed a live demo of how this all worked. It seems like a very tangible offering and the attendees were clearly paying attention.

I then went back to my hotel room to start writing this blog and skipped dinner because from 7:30 to 10pm PST, IBM is throwing it's big Impact 2013 celebration and Matchbox Twenty is the musical guest. I just wish my wife was with me at the show because she likes the band so much...be back soon. Going to the party now!

3 HOURS LATER.....

WOW! WOOT! What a concert! Matchbox Twenty played basically a full concert for us. It truly was awesome. This was the first time that I have seen them in concert. My favorite song was "How Far We've Come". The first picture below is Phil Weintraub, IBM Vice President of zEnterprise Software Sales in North America with my two team mates Cheryl Bard (left) and Penny Hill (right). The next 4 of Rob and Matchbox Twenty really need no description...and the last picture is of me an Cheryl.

I hope you all had as much fun reading my Impact 2013 blog entries as I had writing them and I'll see you at Impact 2014 on April 27 - May 1 2014.